It's Christmas in Heaven
It's Christmas in Heaven is a monumentally cheesey and actually rather sinister song by Monty Python which is at the end of their film, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. It starts off when the Grim Reaper (John Cleese) invades a normal dinner. The Reaper says that they are dead. The people eating do not believe this. After the people believe they aren't dead one time too many, the Reaper says that it was because of a bad salmon mousse that they all ate and takes their souls away. As this happens, Michael Palin cries "I didn't even eat the mousse!" which is a rare Python ad-lib. The souls are taken to "heaven," which was actually a restaurant seen earlier in the film. Included there are Mr and Mrs Brown who got their livers taken out in an earlier musical number, the Roman Catholic Children from the beginning of the film, the British soldiers and Zulu warriors from the Anglo-Zulu War, the British soldiers from World War I, and the women who chased the criminal to his death. Then, Tony Bennett (Graham Chapman) appears with women in Santa Claus suits with plastic breasts (the women were supposed to be topless but, according to the DVD comments, one of them refused on the grounds that she thought her breasts were too small) and sings It's Christmas in Heaven. Bennett starts off by introducing the audience with a song. He then sings his song, starting off with the fact that kids say "Hark! Those church bells ring!" while snow falls from the sky. The next lyric states that in this Heaven, it's nice and warm and everyone wears ties and looks well turned out. From this verse, we can concur that the Heaven everyone has ended up in is warm and filled with business people. The next verse says that great films on television include The Sound of Music (two times per sixty minutes) and Jaws, Jaws 2, and Jaws 3-D. Family presents include toiletries and trains. Cut to the Biblical Magi with shopping carts where they say, "There's Sony Walkman Headphone Sets and the latest video games gifts for Christmas." This implies that the greatest gifts in "Heaven" are the latest technological toys and presents are obviously the most wanted things. Then, after a sequence of the plastic-breasted women dancing, Bennett sings that it's Christmas (implying the kind of Christmas he said, not the regular one that is devoted to religion, not gifts) twice. The song is then stopped when the Lady Presenter (Palin in a drag) from the Middle of the Film states the meaning of life. With this message –- that this Heaven they've all ended up in consists of an Americanised, consumerist Christmas, utterly lacking any religious/spiritual angle, for all eternity—the reality of the situation becomes clear: Everyone has gone, in fact, to Hell. It can be argued that there is more Sartre influence here –- his No Exit –- and certainly the idea of endless repeating punishment is a staple of Greek Mythology –- i.e. Hades. Category:Songs